In today’s complex business environment, more organizations are recognizing the importance of developing a cohesive strategy to address the challenges of shifting buyer preferences, evolving selling processes, and fluctuating market conditions. This is where revenue enablement comes into play, serving as the glue that unites sales, marketing, customer service, and other customer-facing functions. By driving seamless alignment and providing teams with the right resources and tools, revenue enablement empowers organizations to not only adapt to change, but also thrive in a dynamic and competitive marketplace.

What is revenue enablement?

Revenue enablement is a strategic approach that focuses on providing revenue-generating functions and channels with the right tools, resources, and information to effectively engage with prospects and customers at each stage of their buying journey. According to Gartner, “Revenue enablement connects enablement efforts and uses shared technology, tools, data, analytics, processes, and KPIs to reduce the complexity of the modern sales ecosystem.” As a result, organizations can enhance collaboration across teams, streamline processes, and drive revenue growth. Gartner predicts that “by 2025 more than 60% of sales enablement organizations will need to enable other customer-facing roles.”

Revenue enablement vs. sales enablement

Sales enablement and revenue enablement are related concepts within the field of business and sales strategy, but they have slightly different focuses and objectives. 

A table summary of Revenue Enablement vs. Sales Enablement.

Sales enablement brings sales, marketing, and operations teams together to give sellers the information, technology, and resources needed to effectively close business. Unlike sales enablement, revenue enablement encompasses all revenue-generating departments, such as sales, marketing, and customer success, and customer-facing channels, such as digital commerce and customer service, ensuring that they are equipped to deliver consistent, relevant, and personalized customer experiences.

This holistic approach helps break down silos across departments, drives alignment, and ultimately leads to increased sales and customer satisfaction. In fact, Gartner research estimates that “75% of the world’s fastest-growing enterprises will use a revops model by 2025.” 

The advantages of revenue enablement

Modern buyers interact with several of your organization’s departments and channels, including marketing, product teams, and digital platforms well before they even engage with sales.. To adapt to these evolving customer behaviors, it’s important for organizations to deliver a seamless, consistent experience across every touchpoint. A revenue enablement strategy  helps make that possible and offers organizations several advantages, including:

Improved sales performance

A well-executed revenue enablement strategy empowers sales teams with the resources, knowledge, and processes they need to perform at their best, resulting in improved sales performance and higher conversion rates and growth.

Cross-functional alignment

Revenue enablement encourages collaboration between sales, marketing, customer support, and other departments, leading to better coordination and communication. 

Better business outcomes

By optimizing sales performance and alignment across teams, organizations realize business outcomes such as higher customer retention, faster deal cycles, improved market responsiveness, and increased revenue. 

Consistent customer experiences

When revenue-generating teams and channels are in lockstep, they share tools, messaging, and processes, creating a consistent experience for customers across their buying journey. 

Improved visibility across the customer journey

By centralizing data collection and analysis, organizations can track customer interactions, identify patterns, and make informed decisions to enhance engagement and enable revenue growth.

Making the shift from sales enablement to revenue enablement

Making the shift from a traditional enablement framework to revenue enablement requires well-planned processes and an overarching strategy. Starting the process can seem overwhelming at first, but remember that implementing a revenue enablement approach takes time — and that even small changes can result in noticeable benefits for the business. While there is no perfect roadmap for execution, here are some steps that your organization can follow to implement revenue enablement:

  1. Create a revenue enablement team: Build a dedicated revenue enablement team that includes members from departments that support the revenue cycle, such as sales, marketing, and customer service. Your organization should clearly define their roles and responsibilities and consider how they will support the organization’s revenue goals. 
  2. Align with cross-functional teams: Drive alignment between revenue-generating departments by establishing a collaborative environment for sharing insights, feedback, and knowledge about customer interactions. This helps ensure that everyone is working toward common objectives.
  3. Understand the entire customer journey: Harness data from different touchpoints in the buying cycle — from pre-sales to post-sales — to better understand the entire customer journey. 
  4. Establish shared revenue targets and goals: Determine how you’ll support the business and set shared revenue targets that align with the objectives. For example, you may have different goals for generating net new business, increasing cross-sell and upsell opportunities, or gaining more momentum in a particular vertical.  
  5. Implement the right tech stack: Choose the right tools and revenue enablement platform that align well with your organization’s revenue enablement strategy. To maximize your investment, consider technologies that scale, automate, and drive efficiency.

Revenue enablement platforms

When building out a revenue enablement tech stack, it’s critical to select technologies that allow your organization to create streamlined and simplified workflows across your go-to-market (GTM) team. To accomplish this effectively, consider these helpful tools:

  • Customer relationship management software (CRM): Going beyond managing leads, opportunities, and pipeline, a CRM serves as a central platform for storing customer data and tracking customer interactions across different touchpoints. 
  • Sales engagement tools: These tools support revenue enablement by streamlining multi-channel customer communication, such as email, phone, and social media, and make it easy for sellers to personalize messaging while staying on brand. The right tool will also enable lead prioritization and provide insights that help teams make data-driven decisions. 
  • Sales content management systems (CMS): A sales CMS helps GTM teams manage content in a central location, ensuring that teams have access to approved customer-facing assets, third-party resources, and sales enablement tools. 
  • Customer success tools: These platforms help organizations manage post-sales customer relationships, providing valuable insights around customer satisfaction, retention, and cross sell/upsell opportunities. 
  • Training and coaching software: Onboard new team members and deliver ongoing training on the latest sales strategies, product updates, and industry trends with bite-sized modules that are easily digestible. Coach customer-facing teams to enhance their skills with realistic scenario-based practice that gives them the confidence to reach their goals. 

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Revenue enablement best practices

A thriving revenue enablement approach requires ongoing effort and a commitment to aligning your organization’s functions around a common goal: driving revenue growth. Regularly assess your strategy’s effectiveness and make necessary adjustments to ensure it remains relevant and impactful. To ensure success, here are a few best practices to keep in mind:

1

Establish a revenue enablement framework

A well-defined framework provides a structured approach to revenue enablement, ensuring that all efforts are aligned and coordinated toward achieving revenue goals. To get started, assess your current revenue processes, strengths, and weaknesses. Then set clear revenue objectives and targets, keeping everyone on the same page with open communication and feedback loops.

2

Tailor your strategy to the customer journey

The customer journey spans various stages, from awareness to purchase and beyond. Tailoring your content and goals ensures that you engage with customers effectively at each stage. Has your organization created buyer personas? Personas are a useful tool that can uncover your buyers’ wants and needs and help teams map the right content to the right buyers by stage in the customer journey.

3

Measure the right metrics

Effective measurement helps you assess the impact of your revenue enablement efforts and make data-driven decisions for improvement. Important metrics to consider include conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value, sales cycle length, churn rates, content engagement, and of course revenue growth. Use the insights from these metrics to identify what’s working and what needs improvement.

How we can help

To effectively align revenue-generating teams and channels, you need the right technology. The Seismic Enablement CloudTM includes the essential tools and functionalities that help revenue teams drive efficiency, scale training and coaching, and measure outcomes. Our enablement technology also integrates with other essential revenue enablement platforms includingCRMs, CMS, and sales engagement software, serving as a hub for your revenue enablement strategy. Get a demo today to learn more about how Seismic can support your revenue enablement strategy.